Death or Victory: The Battle for Quebec and the Birth of Empire. Dan Snow
rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">27 Vaudreuil was incredulous, ‘the enemy have passed sixty ships of war where we durst not risk a vessel of a hundred tons by night and day’.28 A French naval officer, de Foligné, who now commanded one of the town batteries, was disgusted with the Canadian seafarers. Having assured everyone that the Traverse would be, ‘of itself, a sufficient obstacle to the enemy’, they should now, he hoped, ‘blush with shame for having waited for the enemy’s arrival before finding out to the contrary’. They had ‘deceived the court and laid the king’s forces and the whole colony open to attack, because they would not take the trouble to get proper soundings’.29 Montcalm was withering in his journal about French sailors, ‘liars and show-offs’ who refused to sail in bad weather and insisted that the Traverse was ‘an invincible obstacle’.30
The French had thought about making a belated attempt to block the channel. A journal records that when it was heard that the British were at Île aux Coudres, the decision was taken to sink ‘three large merchant ships’ in the Traverse, ‘which our seamen boldly affirmed was only 100 feet wide’. Before condemning the three ships, ‘the precaution was taken of sending proper persons to sound the Traverse, and ascertain its breadth’. To the astonishment of the entire colony, ‘it was found to be nine hundred toises [one mile] wide, and that a whole fleet might pass it abreast’.31 An ‘officer of the port of Quebec’ was summoned to explain himself and he admitted that ‘it was 25 years since he had sounded the traverse’. Recently, ‘he had proposed its being done; he was refused payment of the expenses which would have attended its execution’.32
As a result of this revelation, no action had been taken to block the passage. Nor was there much point building a hurried gun emplacement as the British ships would be able to pass outside the effective range of the cannon. It was a devastating admission of ignorance for the colony. The only real mystery is why the French frigates did not attempt to obstruct the Traverse. They would have been able to play havoc with the little open boats with Cook and the other Masters on board. To fight them off larger British ships would have been forced into the Traverse with no preparatory sounding and it would have made the whole operation a lot more dangerous for the British. There is one slightly curious reference to this idea in one French journal which suggests that the frigate captains refused and demanded some kind of security if their vessels were lost, which was not forthcoming.33 Any active defence of the Traverse would have been better than the dismay and detachment with which the French watched the advance of the British fleet. Any delay, even for just a couple of days, increased the chances of a storm catching the British in a bad anchorage, or of sickness breaking out between the crowded decks. The French had lost a serious opportunity to derail the advance of the British force.
By 27 June in clear weather and a fair breeze, the final division of transports anchored ‘within a mile and a half’ of the Île d’Orléans. To one of Wolfe’s officers, it had been a ‘tedious, but pleasant navigation up this vast river, unused to British keels’.34 It had been anything but tedious to the naval officers responsible for keeping those British keels away from French rocks and reefs but they had managed to do so and now after twenty days the remarkable voyage was over. Ramezay was astonished to see ‘120 or 130 sails along Île d’Orléans…among them there were a few Men O’War and frigates to provide support for the invasion’.35 Nothing like it had ever been seen in the river before. The siege was about to begin.
Beachhead
AT FIRST LIGHT a red-and-white chequered flag was raised on the main topgallant masthead of the Lowestoft. As it caught the breeze the thud of a cannon demanded the fleet’s attention. Saunders had given the order for the landings to commence on the Île d’Orléans. A carefully choreographed marine dance now commenced. From all the ships of the fleet small boats detached themselves and made ready to ferry men and equipment ashore according to a carefully prepared schedule. For the first time in the campaign the specially designed flat-bottomed boats were winched out of the ships’ waists and lowered into the water. Four of them were put afloat from the Richmond alone. They had been husbanded by Wolfe and Saunders until now, their use forbidden for mundane tasks, so vital were they to the success of the operation. Smaller ships, schooners and sloops, with shallow draughts crept in close to shore. The flat-bottomed boats all rendezvoused at the Lowestoft and then made for these small ships where light infantrymen and rangers, carrying the minimum of kit, clambered down the sides of the hulls and sat in tightly packed rows, some of them helping the crew of twelve sailors with the oars. By 0500 hours on 27 June the rangers were splashing ashore on the Île d’Orléans, their muskets raised high to keep their powder dry in case the inhabitants or Native Americans were lying in wait. The men moved quickly off the beach and through the empty village of St Laurent, on their backs they carried only a rolled-up blanket and just two days’ worth of food: biscuit and salted meat. Their pouches contained thirty-six rounds of ammunition.1
The boats backed their oars to clear the shallows and headed out to the ships where they collected the regular infantry. They would land in strict seniority; the regimental numbers denoted the notional order in which they had been established, the smaller the number the older the unit. Amherst’s 15th Regiment of Foot was the senior unit of Wolfe’s army and its men would have the honour of landing first. As the flat-bottomed boats picked up the men of the 15th from the Employment, a London-based transport, other boats made for Blackett, Three Sisters, and Fortitude where the men of the 28th scrambled down into them.
It was the start of the largest military operation in North American history. Not only were vastly more ships and men involved on either side than ever before but the total number of soldiers, sailors, Native Americans, townsfolk, and rural habitants within a ten-mile area of Quebec represented by far the largest concentration of humanity in North America at that time, outnumbering the biggest city, Philadelphia, with its population of 24,000 by quite some distance.2
Previous amphibious operations had relied upon getting the troops to shore in the ships’ existing boats, which were small having been designed for tasks like ferrying supplies to and from shore, laying an anchor, or transporting officers to the flagship when summoned. This had put a major restriction on the number of men that could be sent ashore in the first wave. It also tended to mean that they arrived in a disorderly rabble. In the event of a contested landing, success depended on as many troops getting ashore as quickly as possible, ideally in a condition to fight when they arrived. Good generalship, at its simplest, is the ability to deploy as many soldiers as possible, where you want them, at top speed. The flat-bottomed boats could each hold seventy soldiers, vastly more than the biggest of the ships’ boats. Two prototypes had been built at Woolwich after a failed amphibious assault on the French coast and tested on the Thames in April 1758. The London Evening Post noted that ‘on Wednesday last two boats of a new construction, built for landing His Majesty’s Forces in shallow waters, were launched, and sailed down the Thames. They…are rowed by twenty oars, and go much swifter than any other vessels on the river.’ The First Lord of the Admiralty, George Anson (a brilliant seaman turned politician who had made his name circumnavigating the globe in the early 1740s in the Centurion, with Charles Saunders as his first lieutenant) was watching from a barge and was sufficiently impressed to order as many as could be built within the space of a month.3 They were now employed on the front line for the first time. Every effort had also been made to maximize the